Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 177
About this tablet
A small clay accounting tablet from the very dawn of writing — the Uruk period, roughly 3300–3000 BCE — now in the Cornell cuneiform collection. It is written in proto-cuneiform, the earliest stage of the script, in which numerals and commodity signs are set into ruled boxes rather than sentences. The legible entries tally quantities against the sign for fish, with further entries marked "small/junior" and a bundle-unit, before the surface breaks away. It is a fragment of routine bookkeeping, but of the oldest kind humans produced: the accounts of a temple or estate storehouse, written before anyone had figured out how to write a full sentence.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives is a short ledger. The first entry records one unit of fish, tagged with the sign KA; the next lines note two units of one denomination plus one of another, then one of a larger measure with one of a smaller. A damaged entry follows, then one unit marked "small" (or "junior"), one unit reckoned in bundles, and another single unit. Near the bottom, three units appear beside the notation TA, and the final line is lost. The reverse carries nothing readable.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse 1 (N₀₁) — fish (KU6~a), KA~a 2 (N₀₂), 1 (N₅₈) 1 (N₀₄), 1 (N₀₂) [...] , [...] 1 (N₀₂) [...] 1 (N₀₁) — TUR ("small"/"junior") [...] 1 (N₀₁) — GI(?) (bundle-unit), (one further sign, unread) 1 (N₀₁) [...] [...] 3 (N₀₁) [...] , TA~a [...] , [...] (Reverse: no legible signs preserved.)
Our translation engine — Opus 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Spotted an error? Suggest a correction — confirmed corrections feed the engine's knowledge base.
Transliteration
1(N01) , KU6~a KA~a 2(N02) 1(N58) 1(N04) 1(N02) [...] , [...] 1(N02) [...] 1(N01) , TUR [...] 1(N01) , GI# X 1(N01) [...] [...] 3(N01) [...] , TA~a [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 177. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA (P325247) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
Related tablets
Related sources
One of the earliest specimens of human writing. Not literature, not law — accounting. The need to keep track of grain in a temple bureaucracy is what pushed marks-on-clay into a system that could one day carry epics.
A window into the world's first total state. The Ur III administration tracked every animal, every worker, every shekel — for a population in the millions. The level of paperwork was not exceeded until the modern era.